“At the end of a Storm” Vol.10
Local Boy in the Photograph
17th November 2022
“Local Boy in the Photograph”
The unreliability of memory and the stories we tell ourselves
A wise old writer once wrote that whilst the body may have served its earthly purpose, the spirit and presence of the human being lives on in photographs and the apocryphal stories handed down from generation to generation. A rather more unwise writer simply describes such photographs to his beautiful son as a time machine and a portal back in time. I hope this will spark an idea or a stream of thinking in my son, perhaps sparking off tangents where I selfishly wish to take him.
Who took the photograph?
Where was it taken?
Why?
Was it a special event?
How old are they and of course where are they now but more pertinently, I hope I’m guiding him to think sideways and question the periphery of the photograph. What year was it taken? What was happening in the world at the time? What was happening in the world of the people in the photograph? Do they have children? Married? New job?
What were their horizons and what were their sunsets?
Following the reading of too many supposed “left field” books, my lifelong affinity for the likes of Salvador Dali, Bill Hicks, Christopher Nolan as well as an existential angst I cannot shake, the theme of memory, its reliability and ultimately its failure to be reliable any more has coalesced with the stories we tell ourselves and my worry is who carries the flame of the stories, the events, the times in the lives of those most precious to us as the familial tree withers with the ravages of the passage of time?
Apocryphal or not, embellished, or just a story that has taken a shape and a narrative all of its own accord, who carries these memories and stories forward, who breathes life into them if we don’t?
The photograph above was sent to me by a cousin yesterday and as it was the first time I’d ever seen this particular picture of my dear old Dad, it made my day (LOOK AT THOSE TROUSERS!) but this beautiful image encapsulates the existential everything of this ode to my Dad. I don’t know where it was taken or why and because of the grainy image I can’t make out the name of the submarine on which my Dad was serving at the time. I can deduce he’s a little older here than in other images I’ve seen of him in his various uniforms and I’d guess he was nearer the end of his 9 year stint in the Royal Navy than the beginning. Familial legend has it that my Dad served 9 years before leaving to help my dear old Mum in raising 3 very young daughters, but is that a memory of a conversation, a certain confirmation in writing, a barely remembered murmur as he was remembered at family gatherings and Christmas? Or have I just made it up, filled in the gaps to make a fuller story, a story of the image and a photograph and a memory no-one now will be alive to share?
My Dad served his country and I can’t be exactly sure for how long or how and why he was discharged. I’ve seen a number of grainy photographs over the years from a photograph album my mum cherished. The naval whites and smoking a pipe in the sands of Africa, rain swept in a trench coat and in an the unknown darkness of an unknown dockyard. I remember so many stories (remember? stories? Editor) of the man known by the moniker “Blackie” and how he hadn’t always been the underground man to go to in the factory for cheap tobacco and anything else he could make and sell to make a few extra pennies. No. He’d led this other life you see, of a submariner for the Royal Navy, he’d swam in the Black Sea and the Dead Sea and it was a sailor’s life for he until, he stole a chip from the bag of a young lady in Portsmouth, and the Blackford family tree would soon have 3 very quickly sprouting additions.
I would make a fourth, but this isn’t about me. It’s about the local boy in the photograph who’d soon leave the navy and swap the claustrophobia of a life beneath the waves to an arduous factory life for the company who famously invented the “Model T”. It’s a life I simply can’t imagine and far away from the cossetted failure who dreams of being a writer, but this isn’t about me. It’s about the young man in the photograph who whilst propping up a bar in another universe now for well over 3 decades and who I miss so, so much, he’s alive and well in the photograph sent to me yesterday.
Early 20’s, proud smile, in the prime of his young life. 3 children on the horizon and a fourth to be cradled and smothered in the proudest of all smiles still a full adult generation away. In between he’d proudly see all three daughters married, frequent the three pubs all in stumbling distance and run an underground market in tobacco in the enemy territory of a rival city and be accepted as one of their own. My Dad was a bounder, a cad, a joke teller and a teller of the tallest tales whilst holding court at his very own bar, the nearest pub or, according to my Mum, the nearest betting shop!
I have my own memories and stories of my Dad, but this is about the young man in the photograph. When was this taken? Was he married to Mum at the time or were they still, in that quintessentially English phrase, “courting”. Did he really swim in the Dead Sea? Africa? Did he really go to Malta as my Mum was so proud of saying when I visited that beautiful oasis in the sun during a long ago summer?
The rhetorical nature of these questions is the simply obvious, and that I don’t have many if any family members who know the answers. What then becomes of this photograph, this memory, and all of their associated stories? Who will remember the stories and who will make up the stories that become a cherished memory?
So I reckon my Dad left this somewhat staged photograph and opened a nearby doorway into the baking heat of a summers day in Portsmouth dockyard just as the end of day siren blared its sweet song to the worker ants who quickly raced away from the entrance to her Majesty’s ship building yard on the south coast of England on hundreds and hundreds of bicycles. I see my Dad now rolling a cigarette for the walk home, a straight shot if a long one at over 2 miles or so but in my mind’s eye he’s walking it, smoking as he goes, before a late bet on the greyhounds, a quick drink in a pub called “The Viking” and back to the loving home he shared with the young lady whose eyes would always twinkle like stars whenever she recounted the night a young man in a navy uniform stole one of her chips before stealing her heart for a lifetime.
“Local Boy in the Photograph” is the perfectly numerically pleasing second chapter of the second Act within my self-published book “At the end of a Storm” (pages 159 through 163) and here’s a handy link as well as my collected literary pride and joy all of which are available via Amazon.
"At the end of a Storm" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.